If you're away from what you'd rather be doing at the company's discretion, you're working.
It originated with mine workers who would have to take a long mine-elevator ride (30m+) to and from the vein, and companies didn't want to pay for that time. They successfully argued that the time spent riding the elevator was essentially part of your commute, just like driving to work, and they shouldn't have to pay for it.
Lately it's also been applied to things like Amazon warehouse workers, who need to stand in line for up to 30 minutes to go through a metal detector and be frisked on their way out of the warehouse. That time is legally allowed to be unpaid.
In short - even if the work is in some sense "necessary" as a condition of your employment (you would be fired if you didn't wait through Amazon's frisk line), if it's not actually a primary part of the job (the thing they are paying you to do) then they don't have to pay you for it.
The FAA may mandate downtime, but that's not part of worker safety per-se. Consider if the pilot were taking that downtime on the ground - you obviously wouldn't be paying them to do that. Nor would you pay a long-haul trucker taking their downtime.
The company could argue that the "portal" in this sense is the cockpit door (rather than the door of the plane), and that being trapped in the plane during your off-duty time is just an unpleasant aspect of the job (like a miner being trapped in a mine elevator during some of their off-hours). You're perfectly free to watch a DVD or whatever [0] so you're not really on-duty.
This is a pretty shitty thing in labor law overall, but as a descriptive statement - that's how things are right now. If the wheels aren't turning, you ain't earning.
Or at least if you're earning it's through the grace of your employer, not because they're legally obligated to.
[0] Interestingly enough, the FAA doesn't actually mandate sleep during off-hours. Which is a big problem since many pilots are paid so poorly nowadays - they end up flipping burgers to make ends meet, instead of getting the sleep they need. It's caused several crashes so far.
Unless they didn't pay or he wasn't able to relax in that time, which he should have mentioned in the article.
I know one long-haul pilot personally and he still enjoys those long trips. Yes you're away from the family and might fly to the city you don't like for the 5th time this month, but you still get to see a lot, have a prestigious job and nice views from the cockpit.
That maybe so, but it isn't right to say "suck it up, there are others who have it worse". Both groups are treated badly and both groups deserve empathy
That means ferrying the pilots as passengers to location; at which point they become pilots for the next leg. It's still shit. It's bad ergonomically, it's very dehydrating, and you're getting a higher dose of cosmic rays. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cosmicionizingradia...
Aviation is one of the most regulated sectors in both the US and worldwide. The reason why DHL uses subcontractors is not because they want to save money, they aren't allowed to fly in the US. Which is somehow interesting because both Fedex and UPS are allowed to conduct inter-EU flights.
Also, flying Cargo is a hard job. Passengers don't complain too much if the flight is delayed due to bad weather, the logistics companies can lose millions due to that. Pressure for cargo pilots to be on time has always been high and shifts have been long. His view is skewed because Fedex and UPS fly mostly domestically with short legs (3-4h). If you compare Southern to other global freight companies (e.g. Cargolux), conditions aren't worse. It's normal to be away from home for a week and only have stopovers somewhere in the desert or the middle of Siberia.
I somehow doubt the 23h flight story (the wording is very vague "asked to sit on a flight") since regulation for pilots is very strict.
If Southern forces a pilot to fly a 23h shift with no third pilot on board then I'm sure the FAA would be very interested in that story and it would have consequences.
My guess is that there was a third pilot on board. It then still sucks having to be in an aircraft for 23h, but he didn't have to work for 23h straight (which would've been very dangerous).
As hard as it might be for someone who dreamed of the amazing pilot job and is now flying weird shifts to unattractive cities: This is not an issue of outsourcing to get things cheaper or of paying people minimum wage for hard physical work without the chance of being represented by a union. He doesn't see his family as much as he wants but at least he's able to feed them.